From aging out of foster care at seventeen to building Aqua Ollie for her grandson, one medical technologist and mother explains the single promise behind every fast, decisive move she has ever made for a child who needed her.
Influential Woman · Medical Laboratory Technology
Sherry Gandy
Chief Executive Officer & Founder, Aqua Ollie LLC
Cedartown, GA 30125
23Years experience
1Article published
Her Story
About Sherry
I am a foster kid they couldn't break.
I aged out of the system at seventeen with no roadmap, no safety net, and no one telling me college was an option. So I drove to Lanier Technical College, walked in, found a woman scientist, and told her I wanted to learn. She let me in.
What followed was not a transformation story. There was no rock bottom, no dramatic wakeup call. I just found science — and science was real. Undeniable. Every day in that lab I was mesmerized by what I was looking at. I was broke. I was raising children. I grabbed dollar burgers between classes and solved every problem as fast as I could so I could get back to the thing that lit me up. It was almost like a drug.
I hold 5 licenses in laboratory and medical science. I have spent over 20 years in clinical laboratory medicine because that is what you do when you love what you do.
Every skill I had spent a lifetime learning — how to survive, how to fight, how to find answers when the system had none — was about to be tested in ways I never saw coming. His name was Oliver.
Today I am building Aqua Ollie LLC — real solutions for families who need them.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sherry
01What do you attribute your success to?
Refusing to accept that where I started determined where I would end up.
I came out of foster care with nothing. No money. No family support. No roadmap. And I never once sat down and waited for someone to hand me a direction. I looked. I hunted. I got it.
When problems came up — and they always came up — I solved them as fast as I could and kept moving. That is not a skill anyone taught me. That is what surviving teaches you when you have no other choice.
And then Oliver came. And every single thing I had ever learned was waiting there for exactly that moment.
I attribute my success to refusing to stop. That is all it ever was.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
I've learned to listen to the younger generation and the newer students coming in. Although a white cell does not change, technique and science are constantly evolving with things like CRISPR, DNA splicing, and new studies on menopausal women. I absolutely love listening to the students that work with us and hearing about what is new out there. A lot of times, I like to do research for myself and test some of these things, especially being almost 50 and keeping up with everything I have to keep up with. The younger generation is constantly learning and their minds are so inquisitive, so I listen to them.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
If you love learning and learning about the human body, and you're a very inquisitive person and very good at instructions, this is a field for you. It is forever growing, changing rapidly, and you will never get bored. You could specialize in one area, like I did in microbiology for about 4 years. It's an exciting field. You start recognizing things and patterns in people and stuff about health you would never, ever realize anywhere else, not out of a textbook. You learn, and I mean, you absolutely learn some incredible, incredible things.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge in laboratory medicine is that the people making decisions about patient care rarely see what we see. We are the first to know. We are the last to be consulted. The opportunity is closing that gap — making laboratory science visible and valued by the people who depend on it most. In adaptive medicine, the biggest opportunity is in the 166 hours a week when no therapist is present. That is where Aqua Ollie lives.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
I give my work life 100%. I leave everything as if you walked into the place like it was brand new. Each patient that comes in, I will take my time, if I have to, under that microscope, looking for what I have to look for. Sometimes you're only given so many things that you can put in your report to a doctor, and sometimes you have to give clues as to what you see under that microscope, hopefully that he would catch on and order another test or route them in a different way. You really want to help the people that come in. You don't want anybody to leave in worse shape. You want to catch everything you can. You want to treat them like a human being. These people don't know medical. They have no idea. They come to us for help. That's what we're there for.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Sherry
The Hardest Promise She Ever Kept to Herself
A promise made at seventeen still shapes every fast decision she makes for the people she loves.
The call came in the middle of a shift I couldn't leave. My son was being bullied at school - not the ordinary, kids-being-kids kind, but the kind that eats a child alive from the inside while nobody official does anything fast enough to matter. I didn't call a psychiatrist and wait for an appointment three weeks out. I didn't wait for the school to "look into it." Within hours, I had him in a hospital-based homebound program - out of that building, out of that daily damage, and safe. Most parents don't even know that option exists, or that it can move that fast when a child needs out immediately. I didn't have the luxury of slow. I never have.
That instinct didn't start with my son. It started with me, at seventeen, aging out of foster care with no roadmap and no one telling me college was an option. Nobody moved fast for me. Nobody cut through red tape on my behalf. I made a promise to myself back then, long before I had children of my own: whatever else happened, I would never let a kid I loved wait on a system that didn't feel the urgency I felt. If something needed to happen in hours, it would happen in hours. Not next week. Not "we'll see."
I've kept that promise more times than I can count, and in more forms than I ever expected.
I kept it when Oliver's diagnosis threatened to define every year of his childhood before it even started, and I decided instead to build something - a way for him to be in the water, moving and laughing, instead of standing on the edge of every pool watching. That decision became Aqua Ollie.
I kept it when I fought school and state systems for records that should never have been that hard to get, because a child's file being incomplete or wrong is never just paperwork - it's a kid's whole story getting told incorrectly by people who will never meet them.
And I kept it that day with my son, when "fast" was the only thing that mattered, and I already knew, from a lifetime of having to think on my feet, exactly what fast looked like.
I hold five licenses in laboratory and medical science. I've spent over twenty years in clinical laboratory medicine being the person who catches what almost gets missed - the clue under the microscope that changes the whole diagnosis, the pattern nobody else clocked in time. That's not a coincidence. That's the same promise, wearing a lab coat.
I don't think of myself as someone who overcame a hard start. I think of myself as someone who decided, at seventeen, exactly what kind of adult I was going to be for every kid who needed one - including, eventually, my own. Aqua Ollie is that promise built into a product. My advocacy work is that promise fighting on paper. And every time one of my own children needed me to move immediately instead of eventually, that promise is the reason I already knew how.
That's the legacy I want to leave - not that I never struggled, but that I turned every hour I ever lost waiting for someone else to act into a reason I'd never make another child wait on me.
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